Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury

Author:Malcolm Bradbury [Bradbury, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781447205609
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

6

I

IT WAS the last tutorial of the Michaelmas term, and Professor Treece sat at his desk, his back to the window, while the dull December light shone on to the pile of examination scripts upon his desk, on to the faces of his three students. Two of them were, he knew, pondering on the quality of their amorous performance for the Christmas Ball, which was to be held in the Town Hall that night, an end-of-term festivity before everyone left for home on the morrow. The third student, Louis Bates, lacked the general excitement. Wedged there tightly in his chair, he looked a pathetic figure, and Treece felt a sense of guilt as he looked at him. The performance of that do-it-yourself intellectual in terminal examinations had been shocking; there were good reasons for sending him down, and the attack had been strongly renewed by the anti-Bates faction at a faculty meeting, where Carfax, careful not to make the same mistake twice, had claimed that Bates had deliberately and while of sound mind abrogated his responsibilities as a student and should be asked to leave. Invited to contribute essays on literary subjects to his tutors for evaluation, he had refused; the fact was, simply, that. Treece had, it must be said, been tempted; Bates didn’t now seem to fit so well into the category which Treece had designated for him, that of the working-class intellectual rising in the world through his own efforts, aided by the tutelage of liberal-minded teachers. Yet in a sense he was this. For it wasn’t necessary that he should be pleasing, or grateful, or even liberal like his teacher. One doesn’t have to stamp the new generation with one’s own concerns and attributes. One has simply to give it the means to emerge in its own shape.

What made Treece so uncomfortable was that he was talking at this moment about Shelley. He remembered the nasty little mistake that Oxford had made in expelling him. He read out to his tutorial group Shelley’s indictment of Oxford: ‘Oxonian society was insipid to me, uncongenial with my habits of thinking. I could not descend to common life; the sublime interest of poetry, lofty and exalted achievements, the proselytism of the world, the equalization of its inhabitants, were to be the soul of my soul.’ Treece read, and watched Louis’s eyes light up. To think that Louis might be put in a position to say the same about their own University was too, too much. Shelley had been an oddity, just like Bates; and at school and university they had called him what Carfax, what they all, had called Bates – mad. Treece knew now that this word should never have been used of Bates. It was strange how unseriously serious men could use serious words. Shelley used to send out offensive atheistic letters to divines, over a false name; to blow up fences with gunpowder; to ask mothers carrying babes in arms, ‘Will your baby tell us anything

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